"Becalmed In Hell - Larry Niven V1.2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Back to Venus, with a difference. This is the astronomical Venus, not the romantic vision of "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth." (But notice the sea images, even in this rationalist's view of the Planet of Love.)

Like all Larry Niven's stories, this one is solidly based on present-day science and technology, and it contains a neat, nasty problem: if something goes wrong with a spacecraft whose control system is a Cyborg, part human, part wires and transistors, is the trouble mechanical or psychological? And how do you find out before it kills you?



BECALMED IN HELL

Larry Niven

I could feel the heat hovering outside. In the cabin it was bright and dry and cool, almost too cool, like a modern office building in the dead of the summer. Beyond the two small windows it was as black as it ever gets in the solar system, and hot enough to melt lead, at a pressure equivalent to three hundred feet beneath the ocean.

"There goes a fish," I said, just to break the monotony.

"So how's it cooked?"

"Can't tell. It seems to be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.

Fried? Imagine that, Eric! A fried jellyfish."

Eric sighed noisily. "Do I have to?"

"You have to. Only way you'll see anything worthwhile in this..this.." Soup? Fog? Boiling maple syrup?

"Searing black calm."

"Right."

"Someone dreamed up that phrase when I was a kid, just after the news of the Mariner II probe. An eternal searing black calm, hot as a kiln, under an atmosphere thick enough to keep any light or any breath of wind from ever reaching the surface."

I shivered. "What's the outside temperature now?"

"You'd rather not know. You've always had too much imagination, Howie."

"I can take it, Doc."

"Six hundred and twelve degrees."

"I can't take it, Doc!"

This was Venus, Planet of Love, favorite of the science-fiction writers of three decades ago. Our ship hung below the Earth- to-Venus hydrogen fuel tank, twenty miles up and all but motionless in the syrupy air. The tank, nearly empty now, made an excellent blimp. It would keep us aloft as long as the internal pressure matched the external. That was Eric's job, to regulate the tank's pressure by regulating the temperature of the hydrogen gas. We had collected air samples after each ten mile drop from three hundred miles on down, and temperature readings for shorter intervals, and we had dropped the small probe. The data we had gotten from the surface merely confirmed in detail our previous knowledge of the hottest world in the solar system.

"Temperature just went up to six-thirteen," said Eric. "Look, are you through hitching?"

"For the moment."

"Good. Strap down. We're taking off."

"Oh fabulous day!" I started untangling the crash webbing over my couch.